Burgermeister Boccaburger
Simon Boccanegra at the Lyric last night was a well-sung slab of solidly second-tier Verdi. The whole cast was good, but Furlanetto (our Godunov last year) was a standout as Fiesco. Nuphy felt for the first time that Hampson, in the title role, was sounding a bit over the hill, but I didn't have a good enough ear to hear that. Frankly, it's a good role for slightly over-the-hill singers. Davis doesn't understand Verdi and the Lyric audience doesn't understand throughcomposition, but with a master tunesmith like Joe Green calling the shots there's only so much damage anyone at a professional level can do.
As usual, I felt asleep during the first act love duet (in this case featuring Lopardo and Stoyanova), but I woke up for the recognition duet and was sitting up in my seat for the smashing council scene. (If you squint during that last one, you can clearly see the words "BOITO WAS HERE" stenciled across it.) After that, the last two acts are a letdown. Nuphy's summary: "He gets poisoned, then he dies from it." And, boy, if you think that consumption is a slow killer, well that's light speed compared to the kind of slow-ass-acting poison they had in 14th-century Genoa.
There's not much to say about the blocking, which is as stolidly traditional as imaginable. The sets, however, were mediocre and ugly. To draw attention from the wonky tile patterning on the floor and the clashing planes of perspective (one for the interiors, another for the horizons), each scene had to have one flamboyantly awful element. In the council scene, for instance, it was an old carpet folded over like a poptart and given armholes so Boccanegra could like perfectly ridiculous whenever he struck an expansive pose. For the map room, it was the hideous pink runner draped over Amelia's Victorian schoolmarm dress. These ideas seemed to run dry by the final scene (which featured a reprise of the bizarre choice to cover upstage center with a pale blue tarp apparently concealing several decaying bodies), so the director compensated with a terrible lighting choice, staging pretty much the entire act in murky semidarkness that made it impossible to distinguish the principals by sight alone.
There was a textual motif running through the production: chalked Italian graffiti in Act 1, printed Latin text in the council chambers, and graffiti again on the walk to Paulo's execution. (Good horror makeup on Quinn Kelsey for that scene, btw.) The graffiti was all simplistic political slogans whereas the Latin talks about Boccanegra and an abbot and seems to have been taken from some mediaeval cartulary.
As usual, I felt asleep during the first act love duet (in this case featuring Lopardo and Stoyanova), but I woke up for the recognition duet and was sitting up in my seat for the smashing council scene. (If you squint during that last one, you can clearly see the words "BOITO WAS HERE" stenciled across it.) After that, the last two acts are a letdown. Nuphy's summary: "He gets poisoned, then he dies from it." And, boy, if you think that consumption is a slow killer, well that's light speed compared to the kind of slow-ass-acting poison they had in 14th-century Genoa.
There's not much to say about the blocking, which is as stolidly traditional as imaginable. The sets, however, were mediocre and ugly. To draw attention from the wonky tile patterning on the floor and the clashing planes of perspective (one for the interiors, another for the horizons), each scene had to have one flamboyantly awful element. In the council scene, for instance, it was an old carpet folded over like a poptart and given armholes so Boccanegra could like perfectly ridiculous whenever he struck an expansive pose. For the map room, it was the hideous pink runner draped over Amelia's Victorian schoolmarm dress. These ideas seemed to run dry by the final scene (which featured a reprise of the bizarre choice to cover upstage center with a pale blue tarp apparently concealing several decaying bodies), so the director compensated with a terrible lighting choice, staging pretty much the entire act in murky semidarkness that made it impossible to distinguish the principals by sight alone.
There was a textual motif running through the production: chalked Italian graffiti in Act 1, printed Latin text in the council chambers, and graffiti again on the walk to Paulo's execution. (Good horror makeup on Quinn Kelsey for that scene, btw.) The graffiti was all simplistic political slogans whereas the Latin talks about Boccanegra and an abbot and seems to have been taken from some mediaeval cartulary.